Negotiation Of Agreements Research Articles

When actions do not match aspirations - comparison of the European Union policy claims against what has been negotiated for health services, trade and investment

BackgroundObligations arising from trade and investment agreements can affect how governments can regulate and organise health systems. The European Union has made explicit statements of safeguarding policy space for health systems. We assessed to what extent health systems were safeguarded in trade negotiations using the European Union (EU) negotiation proposals for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the negotiated agreement for the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).MethodsWe assessed if and to what extent the European Union policy assurances were upheld in trade negotiations. Our assessment was made using three process tracing informed tests. The tests examined: i) what was covered in negotiation proposals of services and investment chapters, ii) if treatment of health services differed from treatment of another category of services (audiovisual services) with similar EU Treaty considerations, and iii) if other means of general exceptions, declarations or emphases on right to regulate could have resulted in the same outcome.ResultsOur analysis shows that the European Union had sought to secure policy space for publicly funded health services for services chapter, but not for investment and investment protection chapters. In comparison to audiovisual services, exceptions for health services fall short from those on audiovisual services. There is little evidence that the same outcome could have been achieved using other avenues.ConclusionsThe European Union has not achieved its own assurances of protection of regulatory policy space for health services in trade negotiations. The European Union trade negotiation priorities need to change to ensure that its negotiation practices comply with its own assurances for health services and sustainable financing of health systems.

Intellectual property and access to medicines: mapping public attitudes toward pharmaceuticals during the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) negotiation process

BackgroundTransparency and accountability are essential components at all stages of the trade negotiation process. This study evaluates the extent to which these principles were upheld in the United States’ public consultation process during the negotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), with respect to public comments about the pharmaceutical sector and access to medicines.ResultsThe public consultation process occurred before the start of official negotiations and was overseen by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). It included both written comments and oral testimony about US trade negotiation objectives. Of the written comments that specifically discussed issues relating to pharmaceuticals, the majority were submitted by private individuals, members of the pharmaceutical industry, and civil society organizations. Nearly all comments submitted by non-industry groups indicated that access to medicines was a priority issue in the renegotiated agreement, with specific reference to price affordability. By contrast, more than 50% of submissions received from members or affiliates of the pharmaceutical industry advocated for strengthened pharmaceutical intellectual property rights, greater regulatory data protections, or both.This study reveals mixed outcomes with respect to the level of transparency achieved in the US trade negotiation process. Though input from the public at-large was actively solicited, the extent to which these comments were considered in the content of the final agreement is unclear. A preliminary comparison of the analyzed comments with the USTR’s final negotiating objectives and the final text of the USMCA shows that several provisions that were advanced exclusively by the pharmaceutical industry and ultimately adopted in the final agreement were opposed by the majority of non-industry stakeholders.ConclusionsNegotiators could increase public transparency when choosing to advance one competing trade objective over another by actively providing the public with clear rationales for their negotiation positions, as well as details on how public comments are taken into account to form these rationales. Without greater clarity on these aspects, the public consultation process risks appearing to serve as a cursory government mechanism, lacking in accountability and undermining public trust in both the trade negotiation process and its outcomes.

Negotiating the Intellectual Property Protocol under the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area: Priorities and Opportunities for Nigeria

Abstract Early March 2021, following its ratification of the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA agreement), Nigeria’s National Office of Trade launched a consultative process into issues constituting the country’s priorities as it prepares to participate in the negotiation of the AfCFTA agreement’s protocol on intellectual property rights (IPRs). We contributed a position paper to that process, with a focus on key policy considerations that should form Nigeria’s negotiation priorities on IPRs. This article describes some of the most important points of our submission and concludes by stressing that the broad policy focus should be to champion initiatives that promote Nigeria’s national interest and, at the same time, recognize and accommodate the ideals of inclusiveness, openness, and collaboration within the context of the AfCFTA. In this regard, the paper recommends that Nigeria should prioritize negotiations in recognition of her strongest economic assets in copyright-related sectors and focus on institutional capacity-building for its patent and technology transfer offices so that Nigeria can effectively take advantage of the relevant Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights flexibilities locally. Nigeria can learn from South Africa in domesticating the appropriate legal framework for benefit sharing and the general protection of traditional knowledge and genetic resources. The Swakopmund Protocol on the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Folklore 2010, the Arusha Protocol for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants 2015, and the African Union model law for the protection of the rights of local communities, farmers, breeders, and for the regulation of access to biological resources offer relevant guidance.

Reframing Best alternatives to negotiated agreements in Representative Negotiations in Sports

The paper starts with differentiating between the positional and interest-based negotiation styles for reaching the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). It outlines the main problems of positional bargaining and the role of agents in representative negotiations in sports. The paper aims at specifying negotiation styles and tactics/games that could produce optimal win-win solutions in sports. It focuses on the need of tactical flexibility, timing, collaboration, issue-linkage and leverage creation that could possibly reframe BATNAs for reaching mutual gain agreements and optimal win-win solutions. The paper aims is to propose solutions for reaching agreements in representative negotiations in sports. The methodology’s starting point is BATNA. The analytical framework includes both choosing the appropriate negotiation style (positional or interest-based) and tactics (negotiation games) to end up with a given strategy. Principled negotiation and mutual gain approach are suggested as solutions. The results of the analysis could be summarized in four categories. The first is the importance of considering the specifics of sports negotiations, especially the advantages and disadvantages of using agents as representatives. Here short versus long-term interests have to be weighed. The second is the advancement of issue linkages, creative alternatives for win-win solutions, leverage and appropriate bargaining style. The third is the focus on the process of reframing BATNAS as a process of evaluating alternatives, seeking leverage but maintaining credibility and flexibility. The fourth is the application of the mutual gain approach to expand the frontier of possibilities. Here the most important is the brainstorming session and the concept of the next best solution.

Analysis of PT. Celebit Circuit Technology's business negotiation strategy with customers

In business negotiations, there is often little way to know how the agreement will be executed properly through negotiations and agreements with both parties concerned. The existence of the company's problems with the customer, the company must be able to provide alternative solutions to problems that occur by negotiating with the customer to seek mutual agreement as decision making. Informants from the PPC (Pre Production Control) / PPIC (Plan Production Inventory Control) section made an alternative as an initial negotiation with the customer in taking the negotiation agreement that occurred. In this study the authors used qualitative methods, with data collection techniques through interviews and literature study and interview data analysis techniques were carried out such as observing, discussing and describing the problem in a certain way. Based on the results of interviews with PPC (Pre Production Control) / PPIC (Plan Production Inventory Control) officers, there are several alternative strategies such as delivery warnings, production deliveries, alternative rooms and partial deliveries. With the end of the "win-lose" negotiation, the company has to find a way out of the problem that actually all parties benefit and see long-term opportunities in the negotiations that occur.

Import demand elasticities revisited

Import demand elasticities are regularly used to compute trade restrictiveness indices, to transform estimated effects of trade policies into ad-valorem equivalents, or to judge on the prohibitive level of various tariff and non-tariff policy instruments. The fast rising number of negotiations of free trade agreements and the fact that non-tariff measures are at the core of these strongly motivates for an update of the import demand elasticity estimates provided by Kee, Nicita, and Olarreaga in 2008 which are based on trade data for the period 1988–2001. Following their GDP function approach, we present import demand elasticities for more than 150 countries and over 5000 products over the period 1996–2014. Countries exhibiting the highest average elasticities belong to the economically biggest countries in their respective regions, while countries with the lowest import demand elasticities are typically small island states. Import-weighted results suggest that especially countries rich in natural resources are facing an inelastic import demand, with the agri-food sector being more price-responsive than the manufacturing sector. Finally, import demand for intermediate goods seems to be more elastic than demand for products destined for final consumption.

Defending access to medicines in regional trade agreements: lessons from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership \u2013 a qualitative study of policy actors\u2019 views

BackgroundThe Regional Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) is a mega regional trade agreement signed by fifteen countries on 15 November 2020 after 8 years of negotiation. Signatories include the ten members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus China, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Australia. India was a negotiating party until it withdrew from the negotiations in November 2019. The RCEP negotiations were initially framed as focused on the needs of low income countries. Public health concerns emerged however when draft negotiating chapters were leaked online, revealing pressures on countries to agree to intellectual property and investment measures that could exacerbate issues of access to medicines and seeds, and protecting regulatory space for public health. A concerted Asia Pacific civil society campaign emerged in response to these concerns, and in 2019, media and government reporting suggested that several of these measures had been taken off the table, which was subsequently confirmed in the release of the signed text in November 2020.ResultsThis paper examines civil society and health actors’ views of the conditions that successfully contributed to the removal of these measures in RCEP, with a focus on intellectual property and access to medicines. Drawing on twenty semi-structured qualitative interviews with civil society, government and legal and health experts from nine countries participating in the RCEP negotiations, the paper reports a matrix of ten conditions related to actor power, ideas, political context and specific health issues that appeared to support prioritisation of some public health concerns in the RCEP negotiations.ConclusionsConditions identified included strong low and middle income country leadership; strong civil society mobilisation, increased technical capacity of civil society and low and middle income negotiators; supportive public health norms; processes that somewhat opened up the negotiations to hear public health views; the use of evidence; domestic support for health issues; and supportive international public health legislation. Lessons from the RCEP can inform prioritisation of public health in future trade agreement negotiations.

Managed entry agreementsas a new legal framework for access to medicines

Key words: managed entry agreements, availability of medicines, original medicines,purchase of medicines, medicinal immunobiological drugs
 The article concerns the new provisions of national legislativea legal mechanism for access to medicines, namely managed entry agreements. Theuse of managed entry agreements in European contract practice is widespread.Ukraine, in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, has reviewed the legal mechanismsfor access to medicines contained in national legislation and had taken the firststeps towards implementing managed access agreements.Ukrainian legislation did not contain such a concept as a managed entry agreementby March 2020, and such agreement was never used in Ukrainian contract practicefor the purchase of medicines. On March 17, 2020, changes were made to the nationallegislation, namely the Law of Ukraine «On amendments to certain laws ofUkraine aimed at increasing the availability of medicines, medical products and theiraccessories, which are purchased by the person authorized to carry out purchases inthe field of health care» which were amended, in particular, to the Law of Ukraine«Fundamentals of the legislation of Ukraine on health care» and supplemented by article791 of which a managed entry agreement to national legislation was introduced.
 The provision of Article 79-1 of the Fundamentals of the legislation of Ukraine onhealth care regarding the parties, subject matter, content of managed entry agreementsis analysed.January 27, 2021, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted a decision approvingthe procedure for the negotiation, execution, modification and termination ofmanaged entry agreement. A standard form of agreement for a managed entry agreementhas been approved. The managed entry agreements procedure has been introducedin Ukraine February 15, 2021.The legal and regulatory provisions concerning managed entry agreements havebeen analysed and highlighted their particularities.

Postwar statebuilding in Burundi: ruling party elites and illiberal peace

Abstract The widespread enthusiasm for internationally-supported liberal statebuilding since the 1990s has become much more tempered, due in part to the mixed record of postwar liberal statebuilding. Over time, many postwar countries have adopted more authoritarian statebuilding trajectories, despite the fact that negotiated peace agreements tend to reflect liberal principles. This is often attributed to ‘liberal’ international actors encountering resistant ‘illiberal’ domestic elites. The postwar statebuilding trajectory in Burundi appears to fit this dominant narrative, with the ruling party, the Conseil National pour la Défense de la Démocratie-Forces pour la Défense de la Démocratie (CNDD-FDD), deviating from some of the liberal principles that underpinned the Burundian peace agreement. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the internal politics of Burundi's ruling party, we show that this account is flawed. We question overly simplified accounts of ‘illiberal’ ruling party elites and we argue that tensions, competition and fragmentation within the ruling party were decisive in Burundi's statebuilding path. Rather than seeing Burundi as an inevitable failure of liberal statebuilding, we highlight how there was some commitment to liberal principles even within the ruling party. Internal struggles within the ruling CNDD-FDD led to current outcomes in Burundi, which should not be interpreted as predestined or definitive. We show that understanding the complexities, diversities and contingencies within ruling parties opens new spaces for thinking about the creation and recreation of political orders after war.

Core-city climate leadership in metropolitan contractual management agreements

ABSTRACT Metropolitan governance and planning increasingly are understood as essential in managing urban growth and fostering a sustainable and climate-friendly metropolitan development. Lately, a contractual turn can be observed in metropolitan governance, in which traditional coordination tools are supplemented by contractual management tools between governmental layers and sectors. This article analyses two cases of metropolitan contractual management agreements, one in the Oslo region and one in the Gothenburg region. The article finds that both agreements build on regional strategies and plans to commit national authorities to invest in infrastructure in these metropolitan areas. The Oslo agreement has more layers than the Gothenburg case, in trying to align national, regional and local authorities’ efforts in both land use and mobility politics. The agreements require advanced leadership competence from the core-city, curbing centre-periphery tensions in metropolitan areas and building local alliances to pressure national authorities in agreement negotiations. We argue that this requires a co-creational leadership role, which, in a multilevel governance setting, must be extended to include dimensions such as distributional balance sensitivity, delineation sensitivity and upward pressure.

Reprezentativitatea organizațiilor sindicale și a organizațiilor patronale

"The relations between trade unions and employers’ organizations are decided by collective labor agreements. The manner in which employers and employees organizations recognize themselves as capable of representing their members is decided by the internal legislation of each country. In Romania, representativeness is an essential condition, which must be met by employers’ organizations and trade unions wishing to participate in the negotiation and signing of collective labor agreements."

Moral Expressions in 280 Characters or Less: An Analysis of Politician Tweets Following the 2016 Brexit Referendum Vote.

Ideas about morality are deeply entrenched into political opinions. This article examines the online communication of British parliamentarians from May 2017-December 2019, following the 2016 referendum that resulted in Britain's exit (Brexit) from the European Union. It aims to uncover how British parliamentarians use moral foundations to discuss the Brexit withdrawal agreement on Twitter, using Moral Foundations Theory as a classification basis for their tweets. It is found that the majority of Brexit related tweets contain elements of moral reasoning, especially relating to the foundations of Authority and Loyalty. There are common underlying foundations between parties, but parties express opposing viewpoints within a single foundation. The study provides useful insights into Twitter’s use as an arena for moral argumentation, as well as uncovers the politician’s uses of moral arguments during Brexit agreement negotiations on Twitter. It contributes to the limited body of work focusing on the moral arguments made by politicians through Twitter.

Domestic Dynamics on Foreign Policy: India's Withdrawal from Regional Comprehensive Partnership Agreement (RCEP) Negotiations

India’s decision to withdraw from Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) has been one of the shocking event in the development of international trade. Not only obstructing many regionalist agenda between India and the whole of Asia-Pacific region, this decision is considered to be in the exact opposite of India’s attempts to direct its foreign policy towards its eastern neighbours, especially on the East and Southeast Asia, through India’s participations in several free trade agreements. This thesis will attempt to explain India’s withdrawal from RCEP negotiation by looking at domestic factors. It argues that domestic pressures are the main factors for India to withdraw from RCEP’s negotiation rounds. In this research, the author will use conceptual framework developed by Thomas Risse-Kappen to classify the influences of domestic actors on foreign policy of a country based on its political system and societal groups to understand more the influences of domestic actors to Indian foreign policy. This research also shows that apart from domestic stakeholders perceptions that the country’s membership in the RCEP doesn’t benefit their economic interests, huge pressures came especially from Hindu nationalist groups, especially from Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), as the core mass support of the current government’s party under the premiership of Narendra Modi (Bharatiya Janata Party – BJP), has been one of the major domestic pressures to understand the roots on India’s withdrawal from RCEP’s negotiation rounds.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do – What Brexit Means for UK Insolvency and Restructuring Law

Abstract This paper asks whether the UK can maintain its insolvency and restructuring pre-eminence post Brexit i. e. after Britain’s departure from the European Union (EU). In the past 20 years or so, the UK is said to have become the insolvency and restructuring capital of Europe or in less politically correct terms, the bankruptcy brothel of Europe. In part, this is because of the European Insolvency Regulation which provides for automatic recognition of insolvency proceedings opened in a EU Member State in the other EU Member States. Such proceedings may make provision for the discharge of debts and the restructuring of financial obligations.The specific insolvency law regime is part of a more general European Private International Law framework. With Brexit, the UK has now left this framework without any negotiated replacement agreement, a so-called ‘skinny’ Brexit. The loss of the ability to deal with insolvencies and corporate restructurings through a single process, with automatic recognition across the EU, may make it more complex, lengthy and expensive to resolve cross-border cases. It gives rise to the prospect of parallel proceedings in different jurisdictions. The paper also addresses how any disadvantages associated with the ‘skinny’ Brexit may be alleviated.

A Comparison of Approaches to Modelling Non-Tariff Measures

Non-tariff measures (NTMs) are a prominent feature of many recent free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations. The implementation of NTMs within computable general equilibrium (CGE) models has been relatively simple to date, with modelers generally incorporating NTMs as tariff equivalents via export or import taxes or as import-augmenting technological (iceberg) change. Our study compares and contrasts two new methods with the traditional mechanisms used. The first new method is the willingness to pay method developed by Walmsley and Minor (2020); and the second, introduced here, provides a new mechanism for adjusting the exporters’ production costs directly, referred to as the export cost method. We find that the choice of mechanism can have important consequences for the estimated impact of changes in NTMs, with mechanisms that raise productivity leading to larger changes in real GDP than those that treat NTMs as associated with economic rents or demand shocks. We emphasize the importance of careful consideration being given to the nature of the NTMs being investigated, the econometric estimates of the associated trade costs, and the CGE model mechanisms being used to assess the impacts of changes in NTMs.

Reducing Cognitive Effort in Scoring Negotiation Space Using the Fuzzy Clustering Model.

Negotiation scoring systems are fundamental tools used in negotiation support to facilitate parties searching for negotiation agreement and analyzing its efficiency and fairness. Such a scoring system is obtained in prenegotiation by implementing selected multiple criteria decision-aiding methods to elicit the negotiator’s preferences precisely and ensure that the support is reliable. However, the methods classically used in the preference elicitation require much cognitive effort from the negotiators, and hence, do not prevent them from using heuristics and making simple errors that result in inaccurate scoring systems. This paper aims to develop an alternative tool that allows scoring the negotiation offers by implementing a sorting approach and the reference set of limiting profiles defined individually by the negotiators in the form of complete packages. These limiting profiles are evaluated holistically and verbally by the negotiator. Then the fuzzy decision model is built that uses the notion of increasing the preference granularity by introducing a series of limiting sub-profiles for corresponding sub-categories of offers. This process is performed automatically by the support algorithm and does not require any additional preferential information from the negotiator. A new method of generating reference fuzzy scores to allow a detailed assignment of any negotiation offer from feasible negotiation space to clusters and sub-clusters is proposed. Finally, the efficient frontier and Nash’s fair division are used to identify the recommended packages for negotiation in the bargaining phase. This new approach allows negotiators to obtain economically efficient, fair, balanced, and reciprocated agreements while minimizing information needs and effort.

CAI is DOA.

The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) that was borne but not formally blessed by China and the European Union in late December 2020 is unlikely to survive in its current form, if it survives at all. In fact, there is good reason to believe that the CAI is DOA – dead on arrival – due to EU sanctions and Chinese countersanctions related to China’s persecution of its Uyghur minority; criticism of the negotiated agreement; and changing political calculations by Beijing and among EU member states.

Old Wine in a New Bottle? Green Industrial Policy and the Use of Safeguards in the Solar Sector

Enhancing manufacturing competitiveness in the solar photovoltaics (PV) sector has been a political priority for numerous countries, with green industrial policies often used to effectuate such priorities. In 2018, safeguards were utilized by the United States as a new form of green industrial policies in the solar PV sector, which was quickly followed by India. Safeguards are distinctly different from other widely employed green industrial policies, and their use threatens the multilateral trading system and impedes much-needed efforts to mitigate climate change. This article seeks to advance the literature on the interaction between green industrial policies and the World Trade Organization (WTO) by exploring the legal considerations and policy implications of employing safeguards in the PV Sector. This article discusses why the WTO would likely find that both the US and Indian measures violate the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the Agreement on Safeguards (AS), but perhaps more importantly reveals several deficiencies associated with the WTO rules and institutional difficulties which may curtail the reduction of trade barriers. This article suggests the negotiation of a plurilateral agreement to eliminate the use of safeguards in the solar PV sector and foster a positive synergy between the trade and climate regimes. WTO, Safeguards, Green Industrial Policy, Solar PV, Trade Protectionism, Climate Change

Promoting equity in the use of algorithms for high-seas conservation

Promoting equity in the use of algorithms for high-seas conservation

PDG33 Awareness and Consideration of Confidential Listing Agreements in Cost-Effectiveness Evaluation By Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Bodies

Use of confidential listing agreements is growing in Québec (Canada). This reality creates an additional challenge during medicine cost-effectiveness assessment by HTA bodies. The objectives are to briefly describe the nature of listing agreements and identify if other HTA organizations around the world are aware of such agreements and how they take it into consideration. A literature review was conducted to assess the nature of confidential negotiated agreements. Then, HTA bodies’ websites were consulted. HTA organizations were selected if their respective jurisdiction was deemed similar to the ‘consumer protection priorities and economic wealth' of Canada (previously identified by the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, PMPRB). Additionally, a short questionnaire was sent to members of the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) regarding confidential agreements. Discount rate agreements, average ranging from 20 to 29%, are the most common form of listing agreement reported in the literature. Eighteen countries or provinces were included in the analysis (either via the PMPRB criterion or via an answer to the INAHTA questionnaire). Two did not have confidential listing agreements. Eight of the remaining 16 HTA organizations (50%) were aware of the content of the agreement and redacted information in their public reporting of cost-effectiveness analysis. For the 8 organizations that didn't have access to the content, including INESSS, different strategies have been adopted to deal with this uncertainty. While some don't take it into consideration at all, most use sensitivity analysis or, based on an average discount, estimate a discounted price. Access to confidential listing agreements by HTA bodies would be ideal to increase the accuracy of cost-effectiveness analysis and optimize the interpretation of results by decision makers. If impossible, HTA organizations should explore different approaches to illustrate the impact of confidential agreements.